Beyond the Gene

A still from a short animation attempts to illustrate C.H. Waddington's idea of the "epigenetic landscape." According to its author "Waddington saw cells as pebbles rolling down a mountain with hills and valleys. The bottom of the valleys represents cell or differentiation states." See →

"There are no depths. Appearance is the summary of phenomena."
—Joseph Brodsky

Life on Earth is a narrative written by the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The chemical design of DNA is uniform among every form of life, but its sequence is different between species and individuals. DNA sequences are comprised of millions of differentially combined chemical letters (A, T, C & G) and yield most of the current diversity of species, as well as offering an endless blueprint for the future design of life forms. Once established, life forms tend to stay within the borders of their species, one generation after the other. However, no two individual organisms, even twins, manage to follow precisely the same script. The reason for this is the so called “epigenetic” impact that expands the boundaries of the DNA language and generates another level of diversity by incorporating life experience in its different forms.

What is epigenetics? In the mid-1960s, a founder of epigenetics Conrad Waddington wrote: “Some years ago [in 1947] I introduced the word ‘epigenetics’, derived from the Aristotelian word ‘epigenesis,’ which had more or less passed into disuse, as a suitable name for the branch of biology which studies the causal interactions between genes and their products which bring the phenotype into being.” “Epi” means “upon” or “over,” and “genetics” implies that genes are involved, so the term reflected the need to study events “over” or beyond the gene.

What is beyond, or over the gene? The DNA of a single human cell is 1.2 meters long and is tightly packed within the micron-size cell nucleus. The packed ball of DNA string has a levitating 3D structure where the different strings overlap and loop around each other like folded fishing line. Each loop contains genes that encode proteins as well as numerous regulatory elements that define the gene activity.. Epigenetics addresses the mechanisms that define gene activity without interfering with the gene structure. Thus epigenetics is more a censorship of the DNA “reading” than an editing of the text.

Francis Crick's early sketch of DNA's double helix structure. It shows a right-handed helix and the nucleotides of the two anti-parallel strands. Copyright: Wellcome Trust/Wellcome Images.

DNA “reading” involves thousands of different proteins that move with extreme precision and sensitivity over the DNA structure, like a blind reader’s fingers over brail. DNA reading molecules are sensitive to environmental impacts, and the longer and stronger these are, more likely it is that cells will tune the pattern of DNA reading to environmental pressure. The meaning of the environmental impact differs between distinct cells and the organisms. For example, in the brain neurons, persistent fear of aggression affects the activity of hundreds of genes responsible for the immediate reaction to aggression, as well as a long-lasting adaptation to life in fear, meaning that many of the genes that operate in the brain of “free” individuals are either silent or abnormally active in the brain of those who live under conditions of oppression or fear. The scope of gene activity and patterns of genes within each given cell generate an individual cell dialect. As cells operate together they form a library of dialects that will eventually drive the emergence of novel and stable features that could not have been predicted by the DNA sequence alone.

The emergence of a common cell language is similar to the emergence of linguistic dialects that liberate individuality from the rigid constraints of scholastic grammar. As genes interact with each other and with the “readers,” life within the cell nucleus appears strikingly similar to life in the ancient Greek seaport of Piraeus, inhabited by Greeks looping into Athens from all around the Mediterranean. The mixture of dialects and the contact between multiple varieties of the same language brought about a new language, “koiné.” Koiné languages do not change any existing dialect, but instead emerge as a spoken dialect in addition to the original ones. As with koiné, our cells do not attempt to change the original DNA language, yet koinéad libitum in response to environmental influences.

The supposed virginity of our genome becomes challenged as soon as we tap into the “dirt” of the world. Bacteria and viruses invade our bodies already in the womb, and even more after we are born. The total mass of bacteria living in a single human can be measured in kilograms. Bacteria have no preconceived knowledge of the future host, and likewise, we are not aware of the invaders. To reach a symbiotic relation, both our body and the collective body of invaders need to adapt to each other to avoid excessive stress of futile intolerance. In essence, the birth of a human is not merely the origin of a new individual, but the onset of a new community. Exposed, the cells of our body tune their genetic language to help achieve the life-long symbiosis between us and “them.” Since partners in symbiotic relationships frequently belong to different kingdoms, yet may be so intimate with each other that one may reside in the other’s tissues and/or cells, their shared “language” tends to be a basic—and ancient—form of communication. Such communication blurs the boundaries between different living entities, giving rise to a single biomolecular network: a “holobiont” with a “hologenome.”1 At the bottom of all of this are our genes, carrying the burden of the environment throughout our life.

Similar to bacterial invasions that challenge our immunity, the brain of a newborn becomes exposed to the limitless number of new signals that will continue to arrive for as long as we live. Similar to how genes in the gut and skin adapt to bacterial presence, the genes in our brain cells become part of a virtual “hologenome,” where not bacteria or viruses but information imprints its presence on the genes and alter their function. A baby screaming in a cradle in the feverish embrace of the world reflect a struggle where our genetic script, which really has not changed that much over thousands of years, experiences the burden of novelty in a cruel and unanticipated form.

Can the burden of novelty be reduced by passing a memory of ancestral experience to the next generation? Can information about ancestral environments be transmitted to offspring via sperm cells? Early in the twentieth century, Dr. August Weismann removed the tails of sixty-eight white mice repeatedly over five generations, and found that while "901 young were produced by five generations of artificially mutilated parents … there was not a single example of a rudimentary tail or of any other abnormality in this organ." Intuitively, Weismann chose mutilation as the most likely experience that could lead to heritable changes. Though naïvely, Weismann mistook a sign of mutilation with its consequences. While tail shortening is obviously not heritable, the trauma of mutilation left a lasting hereditary impact. It turned out that fear can be passed to new generations. Mice were found to pass on the memory of a smell if it was coupled to a strongly painful experience. In the experiment, a particular odorant was paired with foot shock. Offspring of the males treated in this way showed increased sensitivity to that specific odorant, while no change in sensitivity was registered with another. This study suggests the somewhat shocking possibility that parents can inform offspring in an extraordinarily complex chemical milieu via sperm.

While these experiments were done in mice, there is no reason to think that humans are different. Instead of being individually discrete, our flesh and mind may be hostage to our ancestral experiences. While the ancestral influence may have a positive impact, it may also narrate defeat and leave us inept in front of danger. Maybe revolution and its ensuing calamity is merely an evolutionary tool to erase the memory of the past, to start from a clean slate.

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Superhumanity, a project by e-flux Architecture at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, is produced in cooperation with the Istanbul Design Biennial, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, and the Ernst Schering Foundation.

Psychotropic Air
A narcotic nimbus floats above us. As revealed in the 2012 report “Airborne Psychotropic Substances Monitored in Eight Big Italian Cities: Burdens and Behaviors,” the air over Italy is congested with chemical traces and particulates of nicotine, marijuana, and cocaine. 1 The report suggests that global drug use can now be tracked and diagnosed by atmospheric sampling and testing. Narcotic concentrations disclose patterns of illicit distribution and consumption below,...

How will the use of artificial intelligence (AI) affect the workplace and daily life? There is a pessimistic view that “AI creates social problems,” and an optimistic one that “AI solves social problems.” How we understand the impact of AI will be different depending on which perspective we take. But of course, we cannot completely separate these two views from each other, as many have mixed viewpoints, such as promoting AI while maintaining the precautionary principle.
To consider the...

With the emergence of information technology and cybernetics, it became possible to see humans and machines within the same information conveyance and feedback control system. This, in turn, made it possible to both humanize machines and machinize humans, while opening up a discussion of the “posthuman.” “Posthumanization,” an evolutionary process founded upon the advancement of science and technology, evokes both anticipation and apprehension. While humans might largely welcome the utility...

I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world … What interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.
—Lebbeus Woods
According to a theory developed by the influential psychologist James Gibson, daily life entails engaging with and enacting the “action possibilities” of the environment, which he calls “affordances.” 1 Affordances are possibilities for action offered...

In the 1950s, the famous American psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim treated an autistic boy named “Joey.” After ceasing all communication with the world, Joey began to think that he was a mechanical robot. He could only fall asleep after connecting his body to a complex set of machines, both imaginary and real, on his bed. The images he drew, of houses, isolated rooms, and moving vehicles full of machines, contributed to Bettelheim’s diagnosis. In working with Bettelheim, Joey slowly overcame...

A lot of people say that after they punch a wall they feel a lot better, but their hand is broken.
—David Wojnarowicz 1
On June 14, 2017 a fire broke out in a tower block in North Kensington, West London. It quickly spread. The residents’ organization based in the flats had frequently raised safety concerns about the building’s upkeep and maintenance, and expressed anxieties about the poor quality of renovations undertaken there. Their concerns were routinely ignored. The rapid...

1. Dialectics of Living and Dead Labor
In “Fragment on Machines,” Marx made the case that with investment in automated technology, which he called fixed capital, capitalism is able to reduce necessary labor time and increase both surplus labor and value. 1 Marx then speaks of the possibility of sublating surplus labor to free time, which he understood as “both idle time and time for higher activity.” This speculation, in which the type of labor corresponding to a capitalist mode of...

The Extinction of the Magic Circle
In Homo Ludens , Johan Huizinga writes that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.” According to Huizinga, almost every human activity, whether political, economic, or cultural, was originally conceived in play. In the past, labor was accompanied by play and festivities. Scholarship grew out of puzzles in which sages dueled with their sagacity. Even wars were a sort of sport. An enormous magic circle hung over reality. But at some point in...

Death is a plastic force. Operating through communication channels and grounded in a culture of image sharing, domestic spin-off technologies in which death is embedded have engendered a new human body: one that contains within itself ceremonies for the deceased and counterpart sites for a new type of cemetery. These memorials are embedded in modifications of the body itself as auto-performative ritual. In a reflexive mode, this instrumentalization of death and its memorial-body shapes and...

The question of “superhumanity” presupposes that there might exist something other than the human in the human, a presupposition that might be as old as humanity itself. Such an idea has known many returns. It has continuously been addressed within the philosophical tradition, and indeed, it is returning again today.
In October of 1968, at a conference in New York called “Philosophy and Anthropology,” Jacques Derrida gave a keynote address entitled “The Ends of Man.” In it, he insisted...

Humanity has always been a design problem. A problem of whose future is sculpted by design. Of the shape of its user. Its actual interface.
The human is this question of arranging physical, chemical, electromagnetic, and genetic apparatus in time and space. How long a finger is needed to reach the trigger, or stroke another animal? How far must it extend in space? Elevated from humble materiality to a metaphysical program, the collective constellation of these design extensions is the...

Perhaps you have been struck by the frequency and regularity with which people find it necessary to state what one might think was the most obvious thing in the world: that they are human beings, or that they would like to live like them.
Here's an example from the front lines of the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe last March: "'May God take his revenge on them—everyone who did this to us—from whatever country they come from,' said Raife al-Baltajy, a Syrian from near Aleppo, as...

Superimposed memories in the soil of postcolonial Korea
In 1936, amidst the Japanese occupation of Korea, a Japanese kaibatsu corporation called Maruboshi started to build residential areas and stables near the Daegu train station, within which there was a collective village named Maruboshi, near Chilseung-dong. 1 From colonial liberation in 1945 to the end of Korean War, Maruboshi filled with refugees fleeing to South Korea, transforming into a vibrant topos of commoners’ life....

I want to tell you a story I recently heard about a friend in New York—actually a friend of a friend, a young architect and entrepreneur named Peter Green Peter Chang. I have never met Peter Green Peter Chang myself, nor has anyone ever explained to me why his full name contains two Peters. But his story is somehow familiar, even if nothing like it has ever happened to me. Perhaps because it could happen to me or to anyone else in the near future.
In New York Peter Green Peter Chang...

Life is not what it used to be. Living things bearing genomes pared down, streamlined, or cobbled together from bits of synthesized DNA now scurry, swim, and flourish in test tubes and glass bioreactors: viruses named for computer software, bacteria encoding passages of James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from sweet wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools.
In the final years of the twentieth century, émigrés from...

Nothing can hold out against civilization and the power of industry. The only animal species to survive will be those that industry multiplies.
— Jean-Baptiste Say 1
A female Aedes aegypti remains in suspended pregnancy until she ingests vertebrate blood. With hundreds of eggs in her ovaries, she begins a search for carbon dioxide and heat. Once detected, she lands on her host to penetrate the epidermis with her proboscis and deposit saliva, which as an anti-coagulant, ensures...

The rise of right-wing populist, anti-liberal, and authoritarian political alternatives has brought a renewed attention to architecture. In opposition to broad sections of the German architecture community and construction industry, for whom an “open-arms” culture represents a kind of ethically precious incentive, apocalyptics and integrationists are manufacturing rightist spaces based on increasingly solidified ideological patterns. The German right-wing publisher Götz Kubitschek uses the...

Anthropogeny is the study of human origins, of how something that was not quite human becomes human. It considers what enables and curtails us today: tool-making and prehensile grasp, the pre-frontal cortex and abstraction, figuration and war, mastering fire and culinary chemistry, plastics and metals, the philosophical paths to agricultural urbanism and more. 1 Given that Darwinian biology and Huttonian geology are such new perspectives, we may say that Anthropogeny, in any kind of...

It was 2016, and the scales of territories, cities, buildings, animals, plants and human started to simultaneously expand and contract. Proximity and narrative became the matter. So we decide to retreat and prepare for the usual post-apocalyptic era.
Entry 2316.018, Mardin
I turned onto my side to face the dark red sun peering through the sand-covered window. It’s been a long time since I've seen another human being. The city was ruined during the war, to the point where it’s...

Pale light could be seen coming from gaps in a large, low building. A simple clarity had been disturbed. True size was hard to read. The function of this place was hard to define. The surrounding landscape held no markers or signs. Nothing stood close by in order to provide scale. The mass refused to reveal itself. Cuts in the facade were troubling and extreme. Great tears and raw holes had broken through a thin metal skin, yet the basic framework remained. A view through the cuts revealed...

Anton Vidokle: When Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley (the curators of the Istanbul Design Biennial) told me the subject of the show—the question “Are We Human?”—I immediately thought of the writings of Nikolai Fedorov and other Russian Bio-Cosmists, and their ideas about the unfinished state of human evolution.
Cosmism is a little known intellectual and artistic movement that arose in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century. At its base is a philosophy of immortality and...

Chapter 1
As I scan the fields below I see her, in the corner of my lens. She is playing below, in a town I have never heard of, in a place I will never visit. It is 2pm on a Tuesday.
I am on a long mission that launched back in World War I, and I am still flying. I look down on the world. I am unmanned. I am operated, I am programmed and subject to your motivations I drift across voyeurism, horror and wonder. What I choose to focus on defines who you are, and in the glass of...

1. Cognitive Automation and Engineering of the Self
“Observing his subatomic self … no chronology was stable.”
—Jonathan Franzen, Purity
“A knower, whatever name one may want to call it, self experiencer, protagonist, needs to be generated in the brain if the mind is to become conscious. When the brain manages to introduce a knower in the mind, subjectivity follows.”
—Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind
Contemporary technological development tends to move towards...

Creative Destruction and Cybernetic History
I saw the future. It was empty.
A clean slate, flat, designed through and through.
In his 1963 film “How to Kill People” designer George Nelson argues that killing is a matter of design, next to fashion and homemaking. Nelson states that design is crucial in improving both the form and function of weapons. It deploys aesthetics to improve lethal technology.
An accelerated version of the design of killing recently went on trial...

My question is not “What is a human being?” but a smaller question, one that isn’t frequently asked but one that turns out to be important to understand the significance of the larger one. This question is this: do human beings always recognize other human beings as human beings? A special case of this would be: do human beings always recognize themselves as human beings? If they do, what are the means of recognition? One reason for asking the question is because of the way in which violence...

In the first three months of 2016, the number of wealthy Chinese couples hiring fertility and surrogacy gestation services at US-based clinics grew by 260%. 1 Many fertility clinics based in the United States admit that Chinese nationals already constituted 40% of their clientele. This surge was in part a rapid reaction to the end of China’s one-child reproductive policy. 2 Due to the effects of long-term exposure to environmental pollution, many surrogacies requires couples to receive...

There was a period shortly before the third end when a group of mechatronic engineers were incredibly productive. It didn’t last long, but we managed to build a new Copperland, brick by brick, from the basalt rocks formed by rapid cooling solar flares. Mechatronic Systems Science Programs created new devices for communication without cell phones that emit radiofrequencies. Our Incident Update Office transformed crime-prediction algorithms into crime-prevention algorithms and abolished all...

In 1986, during a flight over southwest Amazonia, the geographer Alceu Ranzi noticed a huge geometric earthwork cut through the middle of a vast tract of deforested land. From the ground, the structure was nearly imperceptible, as it mingled with the environment like a natural topographic feature, but from the vantage point of the aircraft, its precise architectural plan was clearly distinguishable as an engineered inscription on the surface of the earth. Ranzi recognized that the “geoglyph”...

If to err is human, to design corrective systems is all the more so. When in 1962 Ivan Sutherland designed the first drafting program that would allow us, amongst other things, to draw better circles, he was in many ways simply providing an update to Leon Battista Alberti’s circle-drawing system issued some five hundred years earlier in De Pictura . Crucially, in both, one does not have to be able to draw a circle to draw a circle . Sutherland, under Claude Shannon’s wily guidance,...

Over the past twelve months, two international initiatives have been closely watched because they appear to set the terms for a new, globally punishable, architectural criminality. The Italian-Jordanian initiative Protecting Cultural Heritage: An imperative for humanity mobilized the UN, Interpol, and UNESCO to stem the looting and smuggling of antiquities out of war-torn Syria by demonstrating that their traffic “finances terrorism” and is “linked to international crime.” 1 At the same...

It’s just been scientifically proven that ducks have abstract thinking. 1 The discovery neither alters nor surprises ducks, since they’ve known this fact, since they are ducks. The discovery just reveals that we, non-ducks, are deeply fascinated by sharing traits that are relevant to our idea of rationality with ducks. If taken really seriously, the discovery is a revolution, marking, in a very nice, duckish way, the impossibility of taking the premises of humanism and humanists seriously....

If you spot a “throbber,” you’ve probably got an issue with your hardware. These small digital animations, more commonly known as buffer icons, only appear when your internet connection or browser speed is too slow to manage the volume of incoming data. In the 1990s almost every webpage used to buffer before it loaded; the old Netscape throbber (depicting a meteor shower over a hilltop) was practically the unofficial logo of the World Wide Web for many years. These days you will only see a...

The 1990s were dominated by debates about postmodernism, one strand of which was concerned with the so called “aestheticization of the life world.” Wolfgang Welsch, for example, wrote in Grenzgänge der Ästhetik , “The facades get prettier, the shops more animated, the noses more perfect. But such aestheticization reaches deeper, it affects fundamental structures of reality as such.” 1 For aestheticization means “basically that the non-aesthetic is made aesthetic or is grasped as being...

"There are no depths. Appearance is the summary of phenomena."
—Joseph Brodsky
Life on Earth is a narrative written by the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The chemical design of DNA is uniform among every form of life, but its sequence is different between species and individuals. DNA sequences are comprised of millions of differentially combined chemical letters (A, T, C & G) and yield most of the current diversity of species, as well as offering an endless blueprint for the...

Per Frederick Kiesler, design is born from a crocodile—a reptile caged inside the architect’s genealogical table alongside a solitary piece of metal. 1 Were it not for the vertical line dividing the two figures, one could picture the crocodile snapping the hard rock with its open jaws and swallowing, slowly but steadily, the large mineral specimen. Design, Kiesler implies, is born by the omnivorous appetite of animal beings seeking to assimilate the most indigestible things, including...

1
I saw the white light through the monitor of my mobile phone—a burst of white light that spread from the upper-left corner of the frame the moment the surveillance camera at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport captured the detonation of the suicide bomb—and this fleeting white light meant that some people’s lives had been cruelly taken from them without any warning.
This was neither the first nor the last time a suicide bomber would strike against innocent people in a modern public space,...

The New Old Gentry
Housing is meant to make our lives more comfortable from the outside. Besides walls that protect us from hostile circumstances, we have equipped the interior with an accumulation of tools and devices. To be spoiled by all those belongings has only been followed by even more things. Digitalization marked a shift in the minimalism of interior design; while it was first about shrinking, smoothing, and hiding those tools and devices, 3D printing and the Cloud enable us to...

“Are we human?” 1 A possible way to answer this question is to ask someone who is not human. So let me ask a “replicant.” This, you may recall, was the name given to the nonhuman figures in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 2 The replicant was a robot that understood humans well. A sophisticated type of android, it fulfilled a series of literary dreams and cinematic fantasies: the desire to “replicate”...

There is something elusive about the term “design.” English dictionaries tell us the word comes from French, French dictionaries point to an Italian origin ( disegno , drawing), but modern Italian uses the English word “design.” French and German have also adopted the English term, while Spanish prefers diseño . Most cultures, it seems, project the idea of design into the sphere of international English and the cool modernity it represents.
In these languages “design” has several...

One morning, while a man busied himself opening his shop, Design and Accident entered into a conversation.
Design proclaimed: “I have created humans; humans differ from others because of me; I shape their minds and lives. Their families, friends, gods, religions, organizations, communities and nations are me; their homes, schools, factories, temples, cities and graveyards are nothing but me; there is no human universe without me; I am what they eat, wear and think; I create sense in...

I
You burn me
—Sappho, addressing passion
A song from my childhood, by Fairuz, Lebanon’s most famous singer, goes like this:
I wish
You and I were in a house
A house the furthest house
Erased behind the frontiers of darkness and wind
And snow falling, wounding the surface of all things,
Making you lose your way, so that you would never leave,
And you would remain,
Next to me you would remain,
While a thousand season of jasmine would blossom, and...

I was thinking of a book, but I didn’t like that idea.
—Marcel Duchamp 1
Posthumous books are published, why not a posthumous show?
—Philippe Parreno 2
Can an exhibition be a productive medium for thinking through , and not just a kind of pedagogical illustration of extant ideas? Certainly there have been works of literature, art, and music with such magnificent ambitions, and intellectuals who have attempted to articulate the philosophy of, say, the novel,...

As of September 2016, “Brangelina” was no more.
That most super-famous of celebrity portmanteaus—Brad + Angelina—which began in 2005, during the pre-social media age, ended eleven years later, in a feverish hysteria of cruel/funny Twitter/Facebook memes. 1 This supercouple, who had surrendered their individual identities to become a clickbait-friendly brand (worth an alleged $400 million), were breaking apart. And there was nothing any of us could do about it. Some of us...

If I am not drowned or killed trying to escape in the next few days, I hope to write two books. I shall entitle them Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus.
—Adolfo Bioy Casares 1
Addressing politics in the Anthropocene, Jodi Dean identifies three possible roles for humans: observers, victims, and survivors. 2 Her analysis of these differing human trajectories exists within a clear Darwinian perspective of the world. The division of humans into passive victims, active...

In 1936, the equation wasn’t yet common knowledge and it was still decades before you could look things up on a search engine. 1 If you forgot something or had a gap in your understanding, sometimes you still needed to “phone a friend.” The best and most efficient design for information retrieval still required you to know people who knew things. Isamu Noguchi wired his friend Buckminster Fuller, an admirer of Einstein, to ask if he knew it. 2
Fuller’s reply to Noguchi—a...

Man is alone, desperately scraping out the music of his own skeleton, without father, mother, family, love, god or society. And no living being to accompany him. And the skeleton is not of bone, but of skin, like a skin that walks.
—Antonin Artaud 1
“Black” and “white” signify their own arbitrariness, and are a deliberate way of maintaining and affirming a kind of colour-blindness. When I name myself or another as “black”, I mean “one whom others regard as “black”. I could not use...

Some twenty years ago, the effects of an expanding regime of design were starting to be felt in the field of contemporary art. Increasingly, designers seemed to use art contexts as platforms for non-pragmatic reflection and expression. Increasingly, design was also becoming a catalyst in so-called "social" art practices, artistic efforts to engineer or test drive new social and/or economic relations. In the work of collectives like Superflex or Atelier van Lieshout, for instance, design was...

When Aristophanes was summoned in Plato’s symposium to speak of eros ( έρως ), he reverted to the root of human nature, the bodily reality of three sexes: male, female and the vanished malefemale ( αρσενικοθήλυκο ). 1 The latter was the strongest and fastest of all, combining both male and female attributes. Its appearance was whole and round with four hands and legs, two faces, and a back on all sides. The creature was not erect and would never stand vertical to the earth. It did not...

The first and sometimes last thing an architect designs is himself. Andrea Palladio was born Andrea Di Petro della Gondola in 1508, and only became "Palladio" in 1538. The new name—concocted out of Pallas Athene , the goddess of wisdom and the name of a character in a play by Palladio’s patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino—designated Andrea as a master of languages, of both humanism and architecture. John Swan is the forgotten son of a mason, but also the moderately known architect John Soan, as...

Self-directed Exit Education
They called me a ‘snob,’ which, obviously, left me overjoyed. I was inventing culture for myself, and at the same time inventing a character and a personality.
—Didier Eribon 1
In Returning to Reims , a 2009 autosociographic account of class flight and proletarian self-hatred, French philosopher Didier Eribon, author of a well-known biography on Michel Foucault and several books on la question gay , emphasizes the role of autodidacticism...

Field Note Excerpt I: By Invitation Only
Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts, USA), May 10, 2016.
Anticipation was in the air. Old friends, new acquaintances, and profitable collaborations. “History is being made,” said one speaker after another. History and synthetic genomes.
I did not realize until sitting at the airport on my way to Boston that this was intended to be a “closed session.” The organizers asked participants not to contact any media outlets or...

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the period when the conceptual framework of the “state of nature” reshaped moral, legal and political philosophy —European forests, new technologies for extracting carbon traces from arctic ice reveal, were taken down at the fastest rate to date. 1 The great forests largely turned into cropland and fuel prior to wood’s replacement with coal as Europe’s main source of energy, and the colonial economy’s appetite for ships finished off the...

If we contemplate any natural object, especially any part of animated nature, fully and in all its bearings, we can arrive only at this conclusion: that there is design in the mechanical construction, benevolence shown in the living properties, and that good predominates: we shall perceive that the sensibilities of the body have a relation to the qualities of things external, and that delicacy of texture is a necessary consequence of this relation.
—Charles Bell 1
Scottish...

I’ve long thought that conventional understandings of geography were a little too “horizontal”. That geographical concepts such as production, uneven development, territory, scale, geopolitics and the like tended to be theorized on an assumed horizontal plane of human existence makes sense, because the vast majority of human activity does more-or-less conform to the relatively narrow vertical band on the earth’s surface that can support human life. But human infrastructures and activities...

This “space of Otherness” line of nonhomogeneity had then functioned to validate the socio-ontological line now drawn between rational, political Man (Prospero, the settler of European descent) and its irrational Human Others (the categories of Caliban [i.e. subordinated Indians and the enslaved Negroes])…
—Sylvia Wynter 1
In 2014 the San Francisco-based Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) requested the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to...

Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.
—Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” 1
Humanitarianism is often posed as a “practice of humanity”: an ensemble of forms of care that protect a notionally universal “human.” But who or what is the humanitarian human? Might the humanitarian protection of humanity also involve a production...

The idea of self-design is a paradox. Or, to put it more accurately, the idea of self-design will be a paradox if the self involved is understood as either too unified or too heterogeneous. If you want the concept to work, you need to articulate the self into an agent capable of taking on the verb “to design,” a target for her labor, and a relatively coherent object that emerges at the end. Even so, paradox lingers. The self that emerges should merge back into the very agent who is doing the...

It is probably a mistake to elevate those attributes of the homo sapiens nervous system that long for the right answer, the unified field, the elementary particle, or the universal truth. These beliefs are present not only in formalized philosophies, religions and political regimes of the human, but at the heart of the human’s daily activities. Some cerebral constructs—the most immaterial and ephemeral of all the body’s inventions—ossify into cast-iron closed loops of logical thinking that...

The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects, but rather extends from carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Our new publication, entitled Superhumanity, aims to probe the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the...

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